Editorial: Where's the money to pay for it?

President Obama laid it out Thursday night — and the question, as always is straightforward: Where is the money coming from?

Speaking to a joint session of Congress, the president pitched a $300 billion American Jobs Act that sounds — gulp! — like the dreaded “stimulus” that has drawn intense fire from his political foes.

OK, so it’s not entirely spending. The president tossed in tax cuts totaling $170 billion, which has drawn tepid early support among a handful of congressional Republicans.

Hanging over all these proposals, though, is this notion of a budget deficit that will total an estimated $1.3 trillion this year alone. The total national debt has zoomed well past $14 trillion.

So, with the deficit and the debt still growing, the president has decided the best way to create jobs is to put even more strain on the federal ledger sheet.

Barack Obama won’t be shouldering this burden alone. Congress, one of two other co-equal branches of government, has just returned from its five-week end-of-summer break. One half of Congress — the House of Representatives — is controlled by Republicans, while Democrats are running the Senate. They, too, are feeling the hot breath of public rage at a nagging 9 percent jobless rate and the prospect of continued anemic job growth.

Moreover, let’s not forget that we’re about to enter a presidential election year.

How Republicans and Democrats navigate through those waters will set the tone for the upcoming debate. Republicans need to take great care here. They do not want to oppose the Democratic president just because he’s running for re-election. They do not want to be seen as keeping people out of work merely because they want to ensure that Barack Obama is a one-term president.

The gigantic stain spreading over all this is the red ink that symbolizes all the money the government lacks to do anything substantive without bankrupting the country.

President Obama hopes, naturally, that the tax incentives will spur companies to hire people, whose income then will provide tax revenue to pump reduce the deficit. And to the extent that tax relief is preferable to spending more money outright, then the president may be inching toward a more preferable job-creation policy.